the first entry of this blog is this

really, i mean that. disregard all of the previous entries, which were just my desperate attempts to rectify my reckless procrastination regarding the infamous American Philosophy class, and are now kept for posterity (by which i mean to remind myself that i really was in college once and it wasn't just a 4 year-long dream and that one day academia will accept me back into her cold, dominating arms, and also to show naysayers that Philosophy, oo la la, she is a worthy thing to pursue)

so i did it, i relocated! well, kind of. it is the case that i have moved myself from one state to another, but it certainly doesn't feel like it yet. i have a hunch that my life decided, after my mom and i left on our road trip, that it would rather stay back in Charleston and Rock Hill, where it actually has best friends and close family and all its personal possessions and memories and love and everything that New York does not have and will not have for most likely a long time, until i really do finally make a comfortable home here complete with some friends and some family and some possessions, but i am afraid that if that takes too long my life might get the idea to pack its metaphysical baggage and hop a plane to Europe to "find itself" because it's been separated from me for too long and it has forgotten that it isn't actually lost, it's just uncooperative, as lives are wont to be.
so in lieu of my life, i'm living in a pretty weird transitory state which is actually a borough called Queens, where i'm taking care of my mother who is taking care of my grandmother who is recovering from rectal surgery whose more awful side-effect involves complete incontinence. to make a long, disgusting and deeply disturbing story shorter (but just as disturbing), the past week of my 218th Street limbo involves various liquid states of excrement. my mom is going home on Friday, and the responsibility falls on me until the catheter gets taken out.

but Queens aside, an apartment was found! once everything medical is finally settled and the horrible liquid after-effects of my grandmother's surgery subside and a nurse who has more qualifications than a bachelor's degree in philosophy is hired to replace me, i can start living in it. it is a sublet on the Upper East Side, a studio with big windows with a big view of 2nd Avenue construction. it's furnished, and it has a murphy bed and a couch and one of those really big flat plasma wall TVs that most people find cool and that i really just find kind of technologically repulsive. it doesn't really feel like home yet, but it definitely has potential. Nathan is coming tomorrow, and in the morning he and I are going to declare it Ours. we got the keys. there's even a mailbox key.

so it won't be until next week when I officially Live In Manhattan, but next week is certainly sooner than I thought it would be.

and in the meantime, when i wasn't tempering my mom's impatience or staring in horror at the prospect of old age, I did a lot of exploring Manhattan's east side on my own. it is beautiful, and i have yet to figure out how to fully express my thoughts. her streets are laden with introspection, and her subways are designed for the introvert. i mean, thanks to the subway system, i'm almost done with Swann's Way and i've avoided several potentially creepy interactions. one step closer to being more than functionally literate and an urban ice queen, and just one week between me and unfettered museum access!

post script: in academic writing, i create what Nathan calls "peanut-butter bubblegum sentences." in informal blogging, i abandon sentences completely in favor of disorganized, paragraph-long clauses that never really seem to get coherently completed. whoops.